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- Donald Trump, getting his insult-comic groove back
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Butter your popcorn and alert the Marshal of the Supreme Court, because multiple criminal investigations of disgraced former president Donald Trump have reached important crossroads.
- The Fulton County judge overseeing an investigation of Trump’s efforts to overturn the presidential election in Georgia has ordered the release of portions of a special grand jury report to District Attorney Fani Willis. That grand jury was not empowered to issue indictments, only to make prosecutorial recommendations to Willis, and when it concluded its investigation, it called for the entire report to be made available to the public.
- Judge Robert McBurney overruled the grand jury’s decision on Monday, citing the due-process rights of individuals accused of criminal activity in the report. Nevertheless, McBurney did announce that he intends to unseal portions of the report on Thursday of this week—specifically its introduction and conclusion, as well as a section detailing the grand jury’s concerns that certain witnesses lied under oath.
- The good news is, McBurney’s decision strongly implies that the grand jury concluded at least some participants in the effort to overturn the 2020 election committed felonies, and recommended charging them. The less-good news is the question of whether any of them face accountability is now entirely in Willis’s hands. And if she chooses not to press charges or only chooses to follow some of the grand jury’s recommendations, we may never know the full extent of the conspiracy, or who managed to avoid legal repercussions. (I’m thinking of Donald Trump specifically, in case that wasn’t clear.)
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The news for Trump isn’t much better at the federal level
- The Justice Department has subpoenaed Trump again to hand over yet more classified material that he previously failed to turn over, and that FBI agents apparently missed when they executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago last year. (Why investigators haven’t sought more search warrants of other Trump properties is a question we hope Merrick Garland wrestles with in his memoirs.) Anyhow, this time Trump’s lawyers handed over more paper material and an unclassified laptop belonging to one of Trump’s aides, suggesting Trump world made digital copies of at least some of the classified materials Trump stole from the White House on his way out the door. Oops!
- Meanwhile, Special Counsel Jack Smith—the federal prosecutor heading DOJ’s stolen-documents investigation and its insurrection investigation—has intensified his efforts. Last week he subpoenaed former Vice President Mike Pence for testimony (presumably regarding the effort to overturn the 2020 election), and has separately summoned Trump lawyers to testify to a grand jury about the stolen documents, suggesting he may be nearing the end of both investigations.
And that’s without saying anything about the criminal investigation in Manhattan! Trump has a knack for avoiding criminal charges that long predates his political career, but it’s good to see three separate investigations reach the point where the prosecutors have to show their cards. Will they indict Trump for the crimes he obviously committed, or will they let him slide again?
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Grab your cape and get ready for the ride of your life with the X-Ray Vision podcast! Join Jason and Rosie as they explore the world of gaming and comics, by taking a deep dive into the new HBO The Last of Us and The upcoming Ant-Man movie. Plus, you can watch full episodes of the podcast right on the X-Ray Vision YouTube channel!
Tune in every Wednesday and Friday for new episodes of X-Ray Vision, wherever you get your podcasts.
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The U.S. government (with an assist from the Canadians) spent the weekend shooting UFOs out of the sky willy-nilly, before we knew much about what the objects were or where they came from—all seemingly to pre-empt bad-faith Republican attacks like the ones they whipped up after the discovery of a Chinese surveillance balloon earlier this month? In fairness, there may be more to this story. What we know is that the U.S. shot three objects out of the sky over Alaska, Canada, and Michigan on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. We also know that government authorities doubt if all the objects were surveillance balloons—one of the objects shattered when struck by a missile, another was believed to be cylindrical in shape. Now U.S. defense and intelligence agencies say they don’t have enough information to determine whether the objects were extraterrestrial, and the White House has been at pains to assure the public that there’s “no indication” the objects were developed or controlled by alien life forms. So to recap: The GOP’s collective decision not to wait for more information about the Chinese spy balloon, and to instead level political attacks against Joe Biden that they plainly didn’t believe, has given the national-security state an itchy trigger finger, on the presumption that we’re very unlikely to unleash a war of the worlds by accident. Incredible work all around.
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- The Saudi regime has funneled billions of dollars through multiple channels to disgraced former president Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner since January 2021. By sheer coincidence, the Saudis undermined United States interests exactly the way Donald Trump wanted them to after Russia invaded Ukraine.
- Texas’s astoundingly corrupt GOP attorney general, Ken Paxton, has reached a $3.3 million settlement with the former state employees he retaliated against after they accused him of corruption; naturally he will pay them with state funds.
- Donald Trump’s failed campaign paid for a private investigation in late 2020 to find “electoral fraud,” then buried the report when it came up empty—hilariously on brand and further evidence that Trump knew he lost before his efforts to steal a second term culminated in the January 6 insurrection.
- Iowa wants to allow meatpacking facilities to fill vacancies with 14 year old children rather than raise the minimum wage.
- President Biden has fired the Trump-appointed architect of the Capitol, for being so comically incompetent and corrupt that even Republicans lost confidence in him.
- Black mothers and babies are likelier to die in childbirth, even when you control for income. If only there were some critical theory that might explain such race-based disparities.
- On a totally unrelated note, the Duval County, FL, school district removed a biography of baseball legend Roberto Clemente from its libraries for possibly violating the state’s new law banning books about racism.
- The Kansas City Chiefs beat the Philadelphia Eagles 38-35 in Superbowl LVII, Rihanna did the half-time show, Elon Musk sat with Rupert Murdoch to commiserate over how unfair people are to right-wing billionaire propagandists.
- OSHA has leveled a $14,500 fine against the Mars Wrigley candy company after workers fell into a vat of chocolate. Sources from the world of pure imagination say Mars Wrigely may challenge the fine, citing the Supreme Court’s historic Wonka v. OSHA precedent.
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The next big political fight over public education and the First Amendment take place in Oklahoma, and it will look very different from the fight against Ron DeSantis’s book bans in Florida. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa, in conjunction with the state’s Republican leadership, are poised to test whether the Republican-captured U.S. Supreme Court will invalidate state laws that prohibit public financing of religious charter schools—in this case, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. The dioceses have applied for a charter, and if the state approves the application, the school will be eligible to receive up to $2.5 million in public funds each year, to teach hundreds of students “faith and morals, including sexual morality, as taught and understood by the Magisterium of the Catholic Church.” The applicants were apparently inspired by an official opinion written by Oklahoma’s previous attorney general, who concluded the Supreme Court would likely throw out the state’s law requiring its charter schools to be secular. The Supreme Court has already blown a hole in the Establishment Clause by ruling states can’t exclude religious private schools from school-choice programs, and would all but obliterate it by greenlighting a Catholic charter school that operates tuition free, entirely on the basis of public financing. If Oklahoma approves the application, we’ll probably get to find out.
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